


Heliotropic

by katietriffy



Category: Kingdom Hearts
Genre: Body Modification, Hanahaki Disease, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Mild Gore, References to Illness, Riku In Love (Kingdom Hearts)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-24
Updated: 2019-10-24
Packaged: 2021-01-02 10:40:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,696
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21160316
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/katietriffy/pseuds/katietriffy
Summary: There is a legend on the Islands (and if it is more than a legend then, well, the adults don’t speak of it where innocent ears might overhear).Riku doesn’t know why he coughs up flower petals, but he cherishes them. They remind him of Sora.





	Heliotropic

**Author's Note:**

> Hi! If you’re here from my P4 days *checks watch* forever ago – technically I am still working on ASoO but. Maybe don’t hold your breath. The KH content though, whew! I sure do have! Something! So here’s this!

There is a legend on the Islands (and if it is more than a legend then, well, the adults don’t speak of it where innocent ears might overhear). If you love someone, and that love is unreturned, flowers will grow in your lungs. Whether they take up all the space you need for air and slowly suffocate you, or steal the air before your lungs can get to it and asphyxiate you, or simply tear your flesh as you move once their roots are grown deep, the Islanders make no mistake – the flowers will kill you. As unrequited love strangles the soul, so too does its manifestation choke life from the body.

Riku is five years old, and much too young to hear about the Hanahaki disease, though romantic tragedy is popular in modern film and the woman a few houses down was carted from her home by paramedics in a rush of blossoms and hasn’t come back. All he knows is that the petals he picks out from his cheeks are pretty and pink, and he lets them dry of his spit before pressing them between the pages of his favorite book. He doesn’t keep them all, but he keeps a lot; they remind him of Sora, somehow.

* 

In his first year of middle school, Riku’s whole grade is brought into the auditorium for a special lesson. These are usually craftsmen demonstrating a career, or the police asking soon-to-be-rebellious-teens not to do drugs, please? But the teachers are grave and while one of the strangers waiting by the stage looks like a doctor, there’s also a teenager and a woman about Riku’s mother’s age. The doctor is solemn and serious. Five percent of the population suffer from Hanahaki Disease at some point in their lives. The human heart is fragile and reckless. There are pictures on the projector – cut open lungs and autopsied throats. The average victim survives less than two years. If you cough up flower petals, don’t wait before telling your parents. They can be removed. Yes, it will remove the feeling that caused them. No, it isn’t worth your life.

The woman’s daughter hid her flowers. Soft pink roses. They show pictures on the screen. The shade is familiar. She loved her daughter. He daughter died from a lack of love. The woman cries. Riku’s math teacher leads her out of the auditorium.

The teenager had the operation. He’s applying to colleges this fall. He wanted to live. He doesn’t love that person anymore – he doesn’t dislike them, but he can’t imagine what he ever saw in them. He told his parents when he first started coughing up petals, and his lungs are just fine now. It’s worse if you wait, because people say the full blooms or even stems and roots hurt much more coming up, and they’re much harder to remove when they’re grown in.

The students are dismissed to their homerooms with worksheets to fill out about the presentation. Riku folds his in half, blank, and rests his head on his desk.

_Make no mistake – the flowers will kill you._

There’s a twinge in his chest. Yesterday, Riku would have said it was fear. Now, he’s not so sure.

* 

Riku is fourteen, and he is in high school, and he is not dead yet. He doesn’t know when he started to think he would die, without question, without hope, but here he is still alive anyway. His teeth grind down on little pink petals so often, he’s forgotten what anything tastes like without the essence of greenery he brings with him everywhere. His breathing is a little shorter than he wants it to be, but when the nurse had him cough for a stethoscope during the surprise-health-exam-in gym-class, she declared him clean of blockage. He doesn’t understand how she couldn’t hear the wild growth inside him.

He could tell someone, in theory, and make it all go away. But he doesn’t even know who he’s in love _with_, because the petals have been here forever, and nothing has changed. When you fall in love, isn’t the world supposed to stop, and tilt on a new axis, and you _know?_ Riku doesn’t know.

If this is Hanahaki, and it’s just taking a long time, he’s a dead man walking. Riku doesn’t want to die, and he thinks he’s maybe not-dying anyway, but if this _isn’t_ Hanahaki he doesn’t know what it is.

He doesn’t want to die. What he does want is maybe a bit harder to come by.

* 

Riku doesn’t know what’s happening to him, and no one else seems to either. He hasn’t found anything, anywhere, about long-term Hanahaki. Well, nothing about surviving long-term anyway. Everything he finds comes back to a choice: life or love.

Minors mandatorily undergo the operation – they’re considered too young to make life-or-death choices with a clear head, especially while ill. Adults, however, can choose to simply wait out their condition. They would rather die than give up on their love, they say, removing the feeling that grew flowers in them would turn them into a whole different person. They would rather die as themselves. They would rather die in love.

Riku cannot have Hanahaki. He simply can’t. Sure, he has flowers in his lungs, but if it was Hanahaki it would have killed him long ago, like every person on the support forums he found.

Besides, who would Riku even

_s_

be in love with? And if he _was_

_o_

in love, who could

_r_

ever be worth _dying_ for? Why would anyone

_a_

let themselves be so weak?

His chest begins to ache a few weeks before the islands come apart under his feet, but the cold of the darkness almost soothes it away.

(almost)

_sora_

* 

When Sora reached out to him, he reached back. Of course his heart chose Sora – though he didn’t know he was doing it, he gave Sora the Kingdom Key to protect him, even from Riku himself. And he needed it.

Sora is enclosed in a great white lotus, and Riku, wilting, comes to a conclusion: no one will ever love you the same way you love them.

It doesn't have to be a sad thing. It’s just the way it is. No one is the same, so no one loves the same. Even Naminé, so like Kairi, has reached out in a way Kairi herself never would, grabbing her shining knight by the memory and dragging him to her. If two people, only ever "meant" to be one, cannot love the same, why should anyone?

It doesn’t have to be a sad thing, but it doesn’t bring him comfort, either. The familiar taste of petals in his mouth does. Sora is so much a part of him that even with his memory in pieces, Riku can trace the roots inside himself like a map right back to him.

Everything is so awful now, Riku doesn’t notice that his breath is coming deep and even like it hasn’t in a long time.

* 

Riku resigns himself to the shadows, and his chest hurts so badly but in Ansem's form, he knows it can't be the flowers doing it. It’s just him, his heart, and the knife he lets rest there, lest he forget the mistakes he's made. 

* 

Of course, with friends like his, that only works for a little while. He is dragged, kicking, fondly, into the light, and maybe the flowers in his lungs, too, are turning toward the Sun. He sees now how selfishly he had acted in his fear, recent and otherwise, and of course Sora wouldn’t care what he looked like (but he was so glad to have his own lungs back) and maybe he had done things wrong, the worst way possible in retrospect, but-

Oh…?  
Maybe…

Maybe his flowers are _growing_ toward the Sun, because he swears he can feel them in his ribs.

* 

During the Mark of Mastery, Riku sees flowers so beautiful and blue he almost cries when he realizes, so much later, that he was in Sora's dreams, and so they might (_might_) have been a gift to him. No one will ever love you the same way you love them, and he loves Sora’s love. He knows now, that he is enough – to stand by Sora’s side, to wield the Keyblade, to protect the one that matters most to him. Why wouldn’t Sora, and his love (whatever its nature and the form it takes), be enough? For the first time in a long time, Riku is content, and he breathes from the bottom of his lungs.

And of course, because everything always works out somehow, the Dream Eater symbol looks just like a bleeding heart petal.

Becoming a Dream Eater hasn't appeared to change him, on the outside, but inside he too is blooming, beautiful and blue.

* 

It takes Mickey's words in the Realm of Darkness for him to understand.

The stalks and stems that curl around his ribs, the leaves protruding from his spine, the beautiful petals he still hides in his cheeks - they're no deathly omen. How could they ever be?

Porous and flexible, they're another layer of armor under his skin, breathing and blooming, they're a sign of what matters most, and if they ever forced the air out of him them maybe he didn't need it anyway –  
Sometimes, you care so much for somebody that there's no room for fear or doubt. Sometimes a feeling is so big that it fills up your chest and it seems like you could live that way forever, and maybe he will. Riku knows that Sora wants him to live, while he wants so desperately now to love – so he will. He will live for Sora, and Mickey and the others who care about him, and he will love for himself. He’s strong enough to live in love.

* 

He is taken, once, by shadows, swirling so tall he can't see the top past the clouds, and glowing blue petals go fluttering in his wake toward the beloved sun behind him.

Like a stubborn weed, what could he ever do but return when the sun comes out again?

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by @PASSl0N tweeting about Riku with hanahaki, to which I responded with this: https://twitter.com/katietriffy/status/1173694439321165824 which became the bones of this fic! Hit me up on twitter to talk soriku B)


End file.
